Maria Muniz monitors her blood pressure with the help of a visiting nurse. She admits she avoids seeing a doctor at all costs. “I got to get up early in the morning, get dressed, wait for my ride to come and pick me up,” she explains. “It was always a hassle.”
As a result the 66 year old great grandmother ignored her chronic health condition and often suffered from headaches and other physical problems. “I didn’t know it was because of the blood pressure because I never went to the doctor,” she says.
Now she gets help from a “buddy”, a small electronic health device that asks her to answer a series of questions several times every day. For example it asks “Did you check your blood pressure before bedtime?”
Maria punches in a button that says “yes.”
That information, along with a blood pressure reading is then recorded and automatically sent to a remote monitoring station. There it can be monitored by her visiting LPN Gregory Rohrs. “We can give her medical advice or send someone to check on her or a doctor,” he says. “It’s like keeping an eye on her when we can’t physically come to her home.
Vicky Hines of Visiting Nurse Service says they have 100 of the buddy telemedicine devices that monitor blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood oxygen levels which are critical for people with heart disease. “We could use five times that number,” she says of the popular devices.
She points out that patients using these devices are half as likely to be hospitalized. That translates to a cost savings of at least $5-thousand dollars for each emergency room visit and hospital stay.
Assemblyman Joe Morelle says expanding these programs could save taxpayers millions of dollars in Medicaid and other state subsidized health care service programs. “This is a way to cut costs, keep people in their homes…improve their quality of life and save taxpayer dollars,” he says.
Morelle is sponsoring a telemedicine bill in the New York Assembly to research ways to expand these uses for the technology and improve access to the programs already available.
The program has changed Maria’s relationship with her own health. She’s even given her “buddy” a name. “I named him Louie because I talk to him every day and use him every day,” she explains.